The university’s Center for Automotive Research Friday is unveiling its new garage and laboratory space at 1320 Kinnear Road dedicated to the study of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles.

“I’ve been involved with intelligent vehicles and self-driving cars for 15 years or so,” Umit Ozguner, center director and professor of electrical and computer engineering, told me. “But recently, with Google Car and other advances, there’s a lot more interest and support funding. It’s a fun topic for students, too.”

The group also needed more space. It expanded beyond the normal walls of CAR at 930 Kinnear Road six months ago to take over additional lab space in the old ElectroScience Laboratory down the street. Now it has a garage of its own as well. CAR has five vehicles with degrees of driverless capabilities that will be stored in the garage, which has enough space to allow teams to work on three vehicles at any given time.

The ribbon cutting this afternoon also coincides with the first meeting of the Crash Imminent Safety University Transportation Center, a federally funded group headed by OSU that will be studying safety issues and how humans and autonomous vehicle systems interact. The center is one of 33 in the U.S.

The duties of the autonomous vehicle group range from the theoretical to the practical, Ozguner said. Funding comes both from the government and from car companies and others in the industry. R&D representatives of Honda Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and Ford Motor Co. were among the industry people expected at Friday’s ribbon cutting.

The U.S. Department of Transportation work is more on the theoretical end.

“We’re facing the prospect of some cars around us basically being robots,” Ozguner said. “What does that mix on the road look like and how do we collaborate and cooperate with it?”

The industry work is on product that one day could be on the road.

“They look to us to test technology,” he said, noting that could be as small as looking at specific sensors to as expansive as developing systems. “We might be working on technology you could see in a year or two.”